![]() The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has recognized that having certain mental disorders, including depression and schizophrenia, can make people more likely to get severely ill from COVID-19. Research Training and Career Development Opportunities.Research Conducted at NIMH (Intramural Research Program). ![]() Upcoming Observances and Related Events.I give this book five stars for its writer’s voice, his advice, and his ability to capture an important turning point in our modern culture.Contribute to Mental Health Research Mobile navigation But you can’t see where you’re going if you don’t know where you’re coming from. Right now it’s enough that I could write and set a book and get it published in less than a year.” Zinsser even anticipates this: “What this will mean for a writer or editor with a word processor is a future that will save time and labor in countless ways that I’ve only begun to glimpse. With cloud computing, direct-to-print publishing, and terrabytes of storage, we no longer have to worry about squeezing a “manuscript” onto floppies that each store only 125 pages. We may think we are responding to the writer’s 'style' actually we are responding to his personality as he expresses it in words." We like the warmth or humor or humanity that he brings to his subject. Often, in fact, we will read about a subject that really doesn’t interest us because we like the writer. Readers identify first with the person who is writing, not with what the person is writing about. It is one person talking to another person. "Writing is a personal transaction conducted on paper. Some things, he says, will never change: "The main thing - whether you’re writing one page or five hundred - is to try to write clearly and warmly and well. Our voices are still our own (although spelling and grammar checkers are beginning to fill in the words for us.) Rewriting is simple and the biggest risk is that we won’t back up earlier drafts. What happens when the computer crashes and his work is lost into the “electricity?” (Today’s more succinct word would be the “ether.”) What will this mean for his practice of rewriting each paragraph to perfection before going on to the next? Will he lose his writer’s voice and become more mechanical? I’ll have no fat manuscript–just two small disks."Īlong the way, Zinsser the writing coach narrates his own story and concerns. In it, Zinsser takes the reader from the moment he realized that word processing was the wave of the future to the day, 10 months later, when he delivered his manuscript to the publisher: “Tomorrow, when I deliver my book to Harper & Row, dodging the ghosts of Herman Melville and Thomas Wolfe and dozens of other writers who walked through the streets of Manhattan looking like writers, nobody will mistake me for a member of the clan. It should be read as autobiography, memoir, and history. It is the first-person story of one author’s transition from the typewriter to the early digital age. Zinsser made that point repeatedly in the text. William Zinsser died in 2015 at the age of 92.Ģ) This isn’t a how-to book. Now in its third edition, it is still a top seller in instructional books for writers.Īlas, this was not in the stars for “Writing With a Word Processor.” Critics on Amazon - even the five-star ones - note that although the reviewers loved Zinsser, the book is “obsolete.” One even suggested that an update would be great.ġ) The man is dead. His “On Writing Well: An Informal Guide to Writing Nonfiction” was an indispensable guide to writers of my generation–and subsequent ones. I was a contemporary of his students (albeit at a smaller rival). He moved on to freelancing for major publications and serving as executive editor of the Book-of-the-Month Club.ĭuring the 1970s, he taught non-fiction writing at Yale University. Zinsser was a seasoned journalist who started his career pounding typewriters for the New York Herald Tribune. I bought the Kindle edition rather than fish my original copy out of my writing library and risk an avalanche. My recent experience re-learning how to use a manual typewriter prompted me to revisit a book I bought nearly 40 years ago: William Zinsser’s “Writing With a Word Processor” (1983). ![]()
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